Germany’s Koenig & Bauer AG, the market leader for machines that print our banknotes, is challenged through e-commerce, cellular payments, and digital currencies. The 201 12 months-old enterprise’s answer is to push into markets which include printing on Coke cans.
“Here we’re attacking the previous monopolist”, Chief Financial Officer Mathias Daehn said in an interview at the company headquarters in Wuerzburg, relating to Stolle Machinery, a unit of Japan’s Toyo Seikan Group Holdings Ltd whilst choosing a lidless Coke can from his windowsill.
Koenig & Bauer dominates the marketplace for printing on three-piece meals cans, but the extra sophisticated printing of two-piece packing containers for beer and Coca-Cola is largely in the fingers of Stolle, Daehn says.
While the worldwide market for 2-piece can printing is set 600 to 800 lines printing around a thousand million cans according to day, Koenig & Bauer lately bagged customers which have been checking out its machines considering the beginning of the 12 months. In addition to high output, the machines allow for a “drastic” discount in changeover times, Daehn stated.
“We are assured that we will quickly be promoting more machines,” Daehn stated.
Printing on beverage cartons is some other section in which the organization plans to fire up the marketplace with wonderful-fast machines, after entering the bendy packaging printing segment in 2013 with the acquisition of Italy’s Flexotecnica SpA, tripling its market proportion to 9 percentage.
That’s a place wherein the manufacturer wants to “simply boost up,” has launched a gadget for full-shade digital printing on beverage cartons, Daehn stated. As producers need to print new designs ever faster, the organization’s technology will show its benefits, resulting in greater deals along with a current sale to Tetra Pak, a key consumer, the CFO stated.
Cash printing machines nonetheless king
Despite the upward thrust of digital payments, the banknote printing machines commercial enterprise is about to remain robust.
“In high-margin protection printing, where we keep over ninety percent of the world market, we continue to look an excellent development with a solid new machines business,” Daehn said. “Especially rising markets need increasing amounts of cash, as cash inflow intently correlates with a gross home product”, Daehn stated, countering reviews that banknotes are becoming obsolete due to the advance of cashless bills.
Koenig & Bauer, wherein Chief Executive Claus Bolza-Schuenemann, extraordinary-great-grandson of the organization founder, and his own family still personal approximately one-fifth of the stocks is tight-lipped about the customers of their banknote printing machines. However, Daehn showed that every one U.S. Dollar and euro banknotes are printed on the agency’s machines. In August, Giesecke+Devrient ordered numerous traces for production of banknotes in Egypt, helping the corporation’s “Special” section to outgrow its other organizations.
Koenig & Bauer’s leading role in printing money is based totally on its research and improvement efforts, Daehn said, pulling a bill from his wallet, a specimen published with a device of his enterprise. A hemisphere appears to bulge out of the paper. Koenig & Bauer calls the technology “Susi Optics” and claims it’s miles one of the most powerful protection elements currently available. From May, a comparable characteristic could be printed on new banknotes for circulating, he says.
In March, the producer suggested a third consecutive yr of revenue increase. After downsizing operations in the first half of this decade, newspaper printing, which as soon as made the organization big, is now simply over one percent of recent business, however worthwhile once more, the CFO said.
The first two months of 2019 had been “very desirable,” Daehn stated. “The venture state of affairs is ideal and the orders are excellent, too.”
Little cyclical business
“Koenig & Bauer is getting into new, dynamic markets with innovative merchandise,” Henning Breiter, an analyst at Hauck & Aufhaeuser, told Bloomberg. Tetra Pak alone could have the capacity to buy machines worth seven-hundred million euros ($784 million) from Koenig & Bauer, he said.
Management’s optimism at the beginning of 2019 is “very encouraging,” underpinning the organization’s target for 4 percent revenue boom this yr, Breiter stated, adding Koenig & Bauer’s financial objectives for 2023 are “quite conservative.” The organization these days is greater compared to business gadget makers which includes GEA Group AG, Krones AG or Andritz AG than to standard printing press producers that have decrease profitability, he said.
